God bless our local council!

We have two main roads through our little town; the main road and the, affectionately called, back road. Both of which sustained major damage during the recent floods.

The council recently played an absolute blinder and in it’s wisdom decided to get all the repairs to the roads caused by the flooding repaired in one fell swoop.

bra – bloody-vo!

What a brilliant idea. I can just imagine them in their cosy council offices dunking their one dips (due to the cuts they can’t afford two dip biscuits any more) in their tea and wondering what they could do for a laugh.

“I know! Let’s put temporary traffic lights on the main road through Littletown and close the alternative route down completely for three weeks. That’ll cause some fun!”

And cause some fun it did.

The queue of traffic on the main road is a sight to behold. Journeys that should take 15 minutes are now taking an hour and fifteen minutes. To say that it’s chaos on the road isn’t overstating the case. God help any pedestrian who thinks it might be worth making a run for it as the lights finally change to green, they’ll be mown down without a second thought!

Tempers are fraying, patience is wearing thin and the standard of driving is abysmal.

It can’t be a coincidence that the sudden upturn in the number of stunningly bad humoured and rude drivers passing through the town has happened at exactly the same time as the road repair fiasco. Everyone is so frustrated that red light jumping, cutting up other drivers, rude gestures and shouted oaths can almost be forgiven after having completed the endurance test that is a drive from one end of this town to the other.

So, even when our council finally manages to be efficient and get a job done in reasonable time, it still manages to royally balls it up, piss off the entire town and anyone else who is unlucky enough to have to travel here.

It’s good job we’ve had the Olympics to cheer us up.

Boofuls and me aren’t big sports fans. In fact I’d go so far as to say that when there is sport on the telly I’ll usually go off and find myself some paint to watch drying as I consider that to be more interesting.

However. We are British and unless you’ve been living on Mars for the last few years you can’t fail to have noticed that we have been the Olympic hosts this time round.

When the G4 debacle surfaced it felt a bit like,’Brace yourself, we’re in for humiliation on a global scale.’

Stiff upper lips we’re starched to make them stiffer still as we prepared to stoically ignore the mocking onslaught from the rest of the world.

You think that’s a bit negative? Of course it is. We’re English, we expect it all to be a giant balls up.

It didn’t help when we read the news about one of the welcome signs at the airport having been printed in Arabic and actually reading backwards so the athletes were greeted with:'”N O D N O L O T E M O C L E W”.

“For fuck’s sake.” We held our heads in our hands and waited for the worst.

Then.

Oh. My. God!

The opening ceremony was bloody superb. Well bloody done!!

Then.

Athletes from all corners of the British Isles did us proud by picking up an enormous amount of medals.

Then.

The closing ceremony was incredible!

My God! We actually pulled it off!

All I can say is that the last two weeks have made me proud to be British. Our athletes are heros. I congratulate everyone who had a part in the organising and particiaption, not only of the spectacular ceremonies or the sporting acheivements but also those who took care of the run of the mill stuff; the cleaners, the security guards and all the other unsung heros who make events like this run smoothly. It was a joyous couple of weeks for the nation.

I didn’t actually watch any of the sport though – I had to watch some paint dry.